GRAND RAPIDS -- West Michigan leaders dispute the findings of a nationwide study that showed digital medical records don’t necessarily result in savings.
Research published in the journal Health Affairs said that digital medical records are unlikely to cut costs.
Lody Zwarensteyn, president of the Alliance for Health, said saving and cost cutting from electronic medical records all depend on how long they have been in use.
“Everything depends on the period in which you … pay off your cost,” Zwarensteyn said. “If you say, ‘Look, is it going to give us back our investment in the first year?’ the answer is no.”
Electronic medical records were promised to generate massive savings, as much as $80 billion a year, according to the New York Times report.
But cost isn’t the only benefit of digital medical records.
“Electronic medical records are not only there for the price,” Zwarensteyn said. “Have you ever been a pharmacist trying to read the doctor’s handwriting? They don’t write well and it’s easy to make mistakes. It’s easy to miss things in a file.”
With digital records, the results are completed in real time, making patient care more consistent during transfers, for example, between a hospital and a nursing home, Zwarensteyn said.
Value is added to the quality of patient care, he said. Thus, if they aren’t necessarily producing savings, electronic records are still worth the cost it takes to implement them.
Doctors are easily reminded of protocols to follow or if a patient is overdue for a routine examination, said Dr. Brad Clegg chief medical info officer at Metro Health Hospital.
Clegg had a patient recently with a sore throat who was overdue for a mammogram and pap smear, and because of digital records, the patient was reminded to schedule the exams.
Metro Health Hospital began using electronic records in outpatient facilities in 2006, and in 2009 brought them to the hospitals.
Digital records can also stop waste by preventing two doctors from ordering duplicate tests for the same patient, he said.
However, the Health Affairs study showed, but did not investigate why, that additional tests result from digital recordkeeping.
The New York Times reports:
The study showed, however, that doctors with computerized access to a patient’s previous image results ordered tests on 18 percent of the visits, while those without the tracking technology ordered tests on 12.9 percent of visits. That is a 40 percent higher rate of image testing by doctors using electronic technology instead of paper records.
Clegg said previous articles challenging the savings of digital medical records have shown that if a digital records system is not showing results or improvement in safety or quality aspects of patient care, or demonstrating financial savings, the system was not properly set up or the physicians using the system don’t know how to use them.
“There’s a lot of reasons errors occur in medicine, some of them are errors of (addition), some are errors of omission,” Clegg said. “The computer will help me eliminate errors of omission.”
The study has been criticized nationwide. Again, the New York Times reports:
Health policy experts who have championed the adoption of electronic health records were critical of the study. They noted that the data came from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which is intended mainly for another purpose — to assess how medical care is practiced.